The Australian audiences are for the most part clean-minded, and there is little encouragement given to the problem play out here. Frank vulgarity the people can understand and laugh at, as they did for so long at poor George Laurie’s delightful absurdities, but for the stuffy atmosphere of “double entendre” they have no time; while they are frankly disgusted at many of the plays that appeal to the English, and I do not believe for a moment that productions such as I have seen in London, adapted—and badly adapted, too—from the French, would have the faintest success in Melbourne. There is only one music-hall, “The Opera House,” as it is misleadingly called, or more familiarly, “Rickard’s.” Most nights there are a couple or so of good turns on here, usually by some imported star or trick artist, who comes rather late in the evening; but the whole affair is very dull in comparison with any European show of the sort, and overhung with a rather gloomy air of middle-class propriety. Melbourne boasts of but few gilded youths, not sufficient to make any show of; while, though the “demi-mondaines” certainly do patronize “Rickard’s,” they are studiously quiet, both in dress and demeanour. I suppose there is vice enough in Melbourne, as there is in any other town, but it certainly does not “glitter,” and for the most part the seats of this one variety show are filled by bourgeois families, of intensest gravity and decorum, which is curious, for, on the whole, the Australians seem to take their pleasure—and in Melbourne even more so than in Sydney—with a sort of jollity that is essentially youthful. This spirit of youth I attribute to the open-air conditions of most forms of amusement—cricket and football, racing, boating, and picnicking—while, with a climate warm enough to enjoy themselves in such a way, and with a summer-heat that is neither relaxing, nor sufficiently overpowering to forbid physical exertion—I believe that all these people, as long as they continue to take their pleasures in such a wholesome fashion, will still keep themselves free from the worst sort of dissipation. Next to racing I should certainly place football first in the popular affections, particularly among the lower classes. During the season the whole talk on the trams, or in the trains, is on that one subject, “Well, who won?” or “How did it go?”—being the inevitable question asked of the grip-man, by everyone who boards a tram coming from the direction of any of the suburbs where there has been a match. At first you are puzzled by the gratuitous bits of information the conductor deals out to you with your ticket, or your neighbour, out of sheer philanthropy, beguiles you with, the information often being rendered all the more puzzling by the fact that many of the localities from which the teams hail bear famous names.